What is Zcash (ZEC)?

Zcash has one major added feature on top of bitcoin, which is completely private transactions. This means that both the recipient and the amount sent are being kept a secret, unknown to anyone but the sender and the recipient. Now you’re probably thinking, if the amounts are being kept secret, how do I know there aren’t new coins being generated and inflating the amount of existing coins?

The answer is called Zero-Knowledge proofs, or zk-SNARK.

zk-SNARK are a way of proving that you have knowledge of something without giving out any information about the thing itself. It’s used in ZCash to prove the transaction is valid and does not create new coins, without giving out information about the amounts and the recipients.
Some research suggests that the anonymity of ZCash is fundamentally stronger then the ones provided by other privacy-focused networks such as Dash or Monero.